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Given the Simple Forum is the primo forum software around and W3 Total Cache seems to have the same reputation in its field, I wonder if it might be worth establishing what the optimum settings are so they can both work together.
I need caching software because my otherwise excellent ISP is upset about the amount of time my website uses on their server. I only get an average of about 500 visits a day and about 1500 pages but this is enough to put me over their 100-minute limit.
So I installed W3TC and immediately hit the Java issue (which seems to be caused by their 'minify' option).
I fixed that by checking out of minify. However, excluding the Forum page from the caching would seem to limit the effect of caching in the first place since that's where I get most of my traffic.
However, I found that there's a setting that allows you to exclude pages from caching for logged in readers, which may be the compromise I was looking for. I will report back and let you know how this is working for me.
The website, for anyone who's interested, is flat-chat.com.au. And if anyone has any other ideas on how I can make the most of both Simple Forum and W3 Total cache, I'd be delighted to hear them.
Cheers. 
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first, the problem space... ALL of the forum content appears on a single wp page... the one you set up at install... so of course, that wp page cannot be cached as its all dynamic in nature... all of the appearance of the forum having many pages (ie groups, forums, topics, etc) is just url rewrite black magic...
the problem comes in that caching plugins assume a wp page is a wp page... static in nature... so they see you are on the forum page and want to serve a cached page... not blaming them - they know nothing of the forum dynamic nature... but the wp page is not static...
but the bottom line, is for w3tc, you need to disable the caching for the wp page the forum is on for all types of caching... if you are using an opcode caching such apc or memcache, that is normally okay... javascript, as you note, is a big problem... since we go to painstaking methods to make sure we only load the js that is loaded based on the forum page type - caching it will cause problems... we do offer our own js cache method (and css)... in fact, where we can, we do a lot of internal caching...
100 minute limit? wow... pretty small.. any reasonable busy site would exceed that quickly... sounds like shared hosting...
there are things in the forum you can do too to reduce overhead... of course, since sp sits on top of wp, we have to pay a 'penalty' (dont mean that negatively) in overhead of the wp system compared to a standalone forum app.. but minimize the number of forums and topics shown on a page... 10 forums will require less memory/time than 50 forums... same for number of topics and posts shown...
hope that helps you...
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Thanks for all that
I'm sure that would directly benefit anyone more tech-savvy than I, but the major assistance it has given me is to finally accept that I need to switch webhosting. I've been reluctant to do that since the current host's support service (Suresupport for ICDsoft) is outstanding but it's a lot easier for me to leave the website and Forum ticking along as they are and pay more for a more flexible host. You're right - it is a shared server and it looks like I will be trading up to Cloud-based hosting (whatever that is).
The past two weeks have been a serious pain - lot's of trial and plenty of error - but I guess paying more for a hosting service is the price of success. Thanks again for your advice.
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